The Joy of Text
Dale-y Affirmations
I’m enamored by the notion everything in the Universe has a pure and secret name known only to certain supernatural beings, and, less often, the thing itself. Possession of a Name imbues the holder with immense power to boss the labeled thing around. This is one reason our traditions splitting the sacred from the profane, or the serious from the frivolous, employ euphemism.
We’re careful with names. Names are not to be used lightly. They tell tales. They have Power. When used, as a mother will when combining first and middle names to scold, they throw off the effervescence of magic words.
I use the term God or Lord in religious contexts. Rarely do I annunciate the syllables Yod-He-Vah-He, the name God Himself answers to among pals. Orthodox Jews never pronounce the series, claiming it unpronounceable by humans, and substitute the word Adonai, or Lord, instead.
Few know even the common name of the being called Satan, which is an honorific, by some etymologies, for prosecuting attorney. This hearkens to Job, which tells of a Satan very different than Milton’s, Dante’s, or St. Paul’s. Satan’s actual name — the one God yells when Satan makes Him angry — is probably Mastema.
My mother will tell you she named me for St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. During the execution, Saul of Tarsus, a pharisaic scholar, held his colleagues’ coats while they beat St. Stephen to death with rocks.
Of course, he would become St. Paul, the founder of Christianity. If judged as St. Stephen was, and punished accordingly, the Sanhedrin would still be stoning St. Paul, wearily, these two millennia later.
Like any person with a job, family, and a touch of madness, I inhabit coinherent but distinct spheres of personality, preference, and profession. In some ways, I’ve been trying to explain this to myself this for about ten years, every time I list my dominant identities in website bio-boxes and order them according to my natures, inclinations, and what time I hope the vocations require — e.g.: …is a writer, professor, and lawyer…
Now, Stephen D. Marlowe, Esq. is the lawyer. The adult women of my life, my father, my hetero-lifemate Dylan, and some very old friends call me Stephen, but almost no one else does. Instructor, Mr., Dr., or Professor Marlowe (the students can’t seem to decide) teaches Freshman English. I am Daddy to my daughters. Steve? That’s the dude in a ball cap, jeans, and sneakers, cracking-wise. The writer, a trailer-fab lawn-chair-lizard, was known, for a time, as Rev. Dionysus Jones, or The Reverend.
Law school bud Mike Matile bestowed the name after a series of fiascos culminating with our classmate, Bob Scott, stuffed into a red-sequined danskin, our hot wiring a golf cart, repeated viewings of Sam Kinison HBO specials on VHS, the mounting of a severed boar’s head on a pike, theft of welder’s gloves, and what was probably attempted murder with three cans of Sterno. Such insanity, self-righteousness, obliviousness and chemical abandon lend themselves to eleemosynary metaphors.
Still, age comes. Tolerances for mischief shorten, recovery periods lengthen; sometime in 2007, The Reverend retired. He didn’t rock the loincloth as he once could; he hadn’t the buns. Balthazar Rondel, his glam-rock replacement, comes round infrequently.
Even then, he treats us like whippersnappers do, tolerating and condescending to the elderly. He humors, at best, our pretensions to takin’ it to eleven. Worse, Rondel is damn-near illiterate; he couldn’t write a check if he had funds to cover it. The writer, always The Reverend’s remora, was left nameless.
Then there’s Milton Lesser, who filched our name, Stephen D. Marlowe, as his nom de plume, when he had a perfectly good name to begin with. Insult to injury: Lesser did this decades before our birth.
When Lesser lived, we received emails now and then from his readers. Despite the inconvenience he caused by pre-stealing our name, we always answered his fans promptly, rarely asked for money, The Reverend never propositioned them sexually, and we kept racial slurs to a minimum. Not once, for all the trouble, did we receive Lesser’s royalty checks.
Thanks to Lesser’s nomino-larcenal crimes, the various and variegating natures of our interests and projects, compounded by episcopal shift-changes, and exacerbated by the age of the head and heart containing correspondent parts of Balthazar Rondel’s glittering and rotten cockney soul, we decided — oh, bout two years gone now? — that when we write for public consumption, it will be under our middle name, Dale. Readers of Chapati Mystery, at Fictionaut, and other places the work appears, or has appeared, will have likely noticed. To those for whom this is news: have a snicker, roll your eyes, and adjust. You’ll get used to it.
God, the gods, or other afflicting supernatural forces traditionally reveal True Names during initiations, vision quests, to establish dominance, or upon some anamnesis; sometimes, all the factors converge, as with Saul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus.
In those cases, the shocks are often so profound the seer refuses to live another moment under his or her previous name and leaves all reminders of that unenlightened identity behind, like an unmourned corpse.
Our evolution, as writer and person, has been more gradual. But as we become more what we will be, less who we are, and none of what we were, it is time to reflect better the various slices of our consciousness to describe, if only for ourselves, exactly what the fuck we’re doing on this planet. Think of it this way:
[w]hen I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Corinthians 13:11 KJV
Saul of Tarsus wrote that, but you probably know him by another name.
